Where to start? That is the question.

Fall from Heaven II is a massively epic mod for Civilization IV. It's pretty daunting no matter how you look at it. There are about 20 civilizations, each of which plays differently based on which of the religions it adopts and which of various characters serve as its leader. I'm a bit rusty on all this, so I print out the manual. I end up with a stack of paper about as hefty as the phone book for a size 7 or 8 city.

The first thing I discover - and I'm delighted at this - is that someone's been hard at work documenting Fall from Heaven. Over the course of its development, documentation was always a problem. The ingame civilopedia was in flux and scraps of information were scattered around the Internet. It wasn't clear what this did, how you got that, what this thing meant, and why that happened. It wasn't clear what was working, what was broken, and what wasn't included yet. Works in progress, and specifically betas of complex strategy games, aren't known for their user-friendliness.

But someone named Xienwolf has done a great job assembling a tome - at 224 pages, it's definitely a tome - of Fall from Heaven II details, presenting them in lively layouts that dance nimbly around the spreadsheetedness of all these reams of data. It's an attractive and comprehensive package, and it will build up your muscles if you carry around a hard copy. It opens with a perfectly patient "New Player's Guide", written breezily but informatively by someone who calls himself orangelex44. First time with Fall from Heaven? Xienwolf and orangelex44 will make it as painless as can be. Get the manual here, start on page 1, and you'll be good to go.

(Actually, page 1 is the cover, page 2 is the table of contents, page 3 is creator Derek Paxton's intro, and page 4 is at last the "New Player's Guide".)

Okay, enough of that. After the jump is stuff about the actual game.

As I'm paging through the playable civilizations, it occurs to me that I've only ever played good guys in Fall from Heaven. I've tried a couple of the vanilla human races (although Fall from Heaven's version of vanilla is like any other game's Neapolitan). I've tried the elves, who are the game's turtle civs, ideal for hunkering down in forests and advocating isolationism. I haven't tried either of the dwarven races yet, but in this latest version of the mod, the dwarves lost their unique brewery. No one wants to play a sober dwarf.

Hey, what about an evil race? As I flip through the flashy pages for each civilization, I decide this is a good idea. Fall from Heaven has something called an Armageddon counter. As bad things happen in the world, the counter goes up, causing even more bad things to happen. Demons arrive, diseases spread, the land catches fire, and so on. Evil snowballs. It gets really ugly. Frankly, it wrecks everything. All your nice farms and roads and cottages paved over by Burning Sands, Fields of Perdition, and Broken Lands. It's a real "there goes the neighborhood" situation.

But the evil races have various ways of benefiting from this. If you've ever played Brian Reynold's Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, do you remember how you had a whole new perspective on all that pink xenofungus and those mindworms when you played the Gaians? That's a bit like the way evil and Armageddon get along in Fall from Heaven.

But which evil race? There are the evil vanilla humans (Neapolitan, really). There are the vampires with their blood pets. I'm not sure I want to fuss with blood pets yet, whatever those are. They sound messy. There are the evil wizard /magic user dudes, but I'm definitely not ready to fuss with Fall's intricate magic system yet.

Ooh, look, here's one: the Balseraphs. They're a race of insane clowns, very Malkavian, with carnivals, slaves, freaks, puppets, prostitutes, jesters, and a super-duper hardcore worldparty as their one-off strategic level spell. They're great for spreading culture (insane clown culture, which is the best kind!) and they have a bitchin' Hall of Mirrors that creates mirror images of enemy units.

The Balseraphs it is! They can play under the rule of Perpentach, their mad king, or Keelyn, his daughter (pictured above). Perpentach has a lot going for him, but he has a chance to randomly change traits as the game goes on. Yikes. I can only imagine how that could turn out. So I'm going to instead choose his slightly less bi-polar daughter. I start up a default game, on Noble difficulty (the fourth out of ten difficulty levels), on a standard sized map against seven other randomly determined civilizations, with my named entered as "Tom Chick the Mad". Here we go.

Now let's see how long I can go without making an "Insane Clown Posse" reference.

Oops...

(Click here for the next Fall from Heaven game diary: the first 100 turns)